Nick Mansfield. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Harawa.y
St. Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 2000.
Introduction
This question of the subject and the living 'who' is at the heart of the most pressing
concerns of modern societies. (Derrida 1991, p. 115)
What am I referring to when I say the word 'I'? This little word, which is somehow the easiest to use
in our daily lives, has become the focus of the most intense-and at times the most obscure- debate
and analysis in fin-de-siècle cultural studies. Where does my sense of self come from? Was it made
for me, or did it arise spontaneously? How is it conditioned by the media I consume, the society I
inhabit, the politics I suffer and the desires that inspire me? When I use the word 'I', am I using it in
the same way as you, when you use it? Am I a different 'I' when I present myself in different ways
to my boss, my family, my friends, social security, someone I'm in love with or a stranger in the
street? Do I really know myself? It is these difficult and open-ended questions that-in different
ways, and perhaps simply in different vocabularies- occupy the theoretical reflection of intellectuals
and the anxious self-scrutiny of the citizens of the end of the twentieth century.
The 'I' is thus a meeting-point between the most formal and highly abstract concepts and the most
immediate and intense emotions. This focus on the self as the centre both of lived experience and of
discernible meaning has become one of the-if not the -defining issues of modern and postmodern
cultures. As many postmodern theorists have tried to point out, the contemporary era is an era in
which we must consistently confess our feelings: we answer magazine questionnaires about what
we want, surveys about which politicians we like, focus groups about how we react to advertising
campaigns; televised sport, war, accident and
-1crime are all designed to trigger emotion. The Olympic swimmer coming from the pool, the victim's
relatives coming from court, the accident survivor pulled from the wreckage all must front the
cameras and say how they feel. Our entertainment, our social values, even the work we do and the
governments we elect are all to be understood in terms of satisfaction, pleasure, like and dislike,
excitement and boredom, love and hate. A world where we once knew ourselves in terms of values
and identities has given way to the uninterrupted intensities of elation and grief, triumph and
trauma, loss and achievement; birth, death, survival, crime, consumption, career are all now pretexts
for emotion. Even economics is driven by its painstaking graphs of consumer sentiment.
Things and events are now understood on the level of the pulsing, breathing, feeling individual self.
Yet at the same time, this self is reported to feel less confident, more isolated, fragile and vulnerable
than ever. Rather than being triumphant because of the huge emphasis it now enjoys, the self is at
risk. Selfhood is now seen to be in a state of perpetual crisis in the modern West. Alienated
intellectuals and suicidal youth; culture wars and volatile markets; endless addictions to food, work,
alcohol and narcotics; sexual inadequacy and thrill killers-all feed into education and entertainment
industries that keep the intensity of our selfhood perpetually on the boil, nagging and unsettling, but
also inspiring and thrilling us with mystery, fear and pleasure. It is this ambivalence and ambiguitythe intensification of the self as the key site of human experience and its increasing sense of internal
fragmentation and chaos-that the twentieth century's theorists of subjectivity have tried to deal with.
This book serves two purposes: to outline the various ways in which the issue of the self has been
discussed; and to try to sketch some sort of account of how the self-more than family, locality,
ethnicity and nationality-has become the key way in which we now understand our lives, in Western
societies at least.
SUBJECT AND SELF
Before proceeding, it is worth dwelling on the word 'subject' and its meaning, since it is this term
that is most often used in cultural theories about the self. Although the two are sometimes used
interchangeably, the word 'self’ does not capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement that
is implicit in the word 'subject': the
-2way our immediate daily life is always already caught up in complex political, social and
philosophical-that is, shared-concerns. As Vincent Descombes has pointed out (1991, p. 126-7),
when philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) wrote 'I think, therefore I am', the 'I' he described
was not limited to René Descartes. Although it does not simply leave his own selfhood behind, this
philosophical formulation claims to describe a faculty of reflection that links human interiority
together everywhere. 'Subjectivity' refers, therefore, to an abstract or general principle that defies
our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that, or simply helps us to
understand why, our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need,
desire and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience. In this way, the subject is always
linked to something outside of it-an idea or principle or the society of other subjects. It is this
linkage that the word 'subject' insists upon. Etymologically, to be subject means to be 'placed (or
even thrown) under'. One is always subject to or of something. The word subject, therefore,
proposes that the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of
general truths and shared principles. It is the nature of these truths and principles, whether they
determine or are determined by us as individuals-in short, the range of their power-that has
dominated theory and debate.
TYPES OF SUBJECT
It is probably impossible to produce an exhaustive list of the way the term subject defines our
relationship to the world. For the purposes of summary, however, we could say it has four broad
usages:
Firstly, there is the subject of grammar, the initiating or driving principle of the sentence.
We know and use the word 'I' first and foremost in this sense, as the origin of the actions, feelings
and experiences that we collect together and report as our lives. As we shall see, this type of
subjectivity is highly deceptive: it seems to bespeak the most simple and immediate sense of
selfhood, but because we share the word with every other user of our language(s), it automatically
entangles us in a huge and volatile, even infinite, trans-historical network of meaning- making.
-3Secondly, there is the politico-legal subject. In various ways, the laws and constitutions that define
the limits of our social interaction, and ostensibly embody our most respectable values, understand
us as recipients of, and actors within, fixed codes and powers: we are subject of and to the monarch,
the State and the law. In theory, in liberal democratic societies at least, this sort of subjectivity
demands our honest citizenship and respects our individual rights. Because of this reciprocal
obligation, we 'enter into' or at least 'agree to' what Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) first called a
'social contract' which asks certain responsibilities of us, and guarantees us certain freedoms in
return.
Thirdly, there is the philosophical subject. Here the 'I' is both an object of analysis and the
ground of truth and knowledge. In a defining contribution to Western philosophy to which we will
return in Chapter 1, Immanuel Kant ( 1724-1804) outlined the issues that defined the problem of the
subject of philosophy: How can I know the world? How can I know how I should act in the world?
And how can I judge the world? Here the subject is located at the centre of truth, morality and
meaning.
Fourthly, there is the subject as human person. No matter how exhaustive our analyses of
our selfhood in terms of language, politics and philosophy, we remain an intense focus of rich and
immediate experience that defies system, logic and order and that goes out into the world in a
complex, inconsistent and highly charged way. Sometimes we seek to present this type of
subjectivity as simple and unremarkable: we want to show ourselves as normal, ordinary,
straightforward. At other times we long for charisma, risk and celebrity, to make an impression, to
be remembered. Usually we live an open-ended yet known, measured yet adventurous journey into
experience, one we see as generally consistent and purposeful. It is this unfinished yet consistent
subjectivity that we generally understand as our selfhood, or personality.
To a linguist, political scientist, philosopher or therapist, the issues of subjectivity can be
understood in terms of rigorously maintained disciplinary borders. What makes a sentence
meaningful, a civic society stable, a philosophical thesis defensible or a personal problem solvable
all contribute in different yet important ways to our lives as subjects. Yet the needs of each of these
specialists often leads to hostility and scepticism towards the other equally useful
-4approaches. This book, however, comes from the field of cultural studies. In the rich and
unpredictable field of culture-where we make, perfect and communicate the meaning and
meaninglessness that allow us to live-there can be no strict and simple demarcation between the
subject of the spoken sentence, the citizen in court, the searcher after truth and the person walking
in the street. Indeed, it is the way in which these different understandings of the subject
interpenetrate and complicate one another that counts in the field of culture. In this way, our
definition of the subject must remain speculative and incomplete.
In turn, this also explains many of the choices I have made about which theories and theorists to
discuss in this book. On the whole, my discussion is dominated by those whose impact has been
most keenly felt in the humanities, and in literary and cultural studies in particular. This leaves to
one side many key figures in a more specific and more rigorous philosophical discussion,
particularly in the tradition of phenomenology, which runs from Edmund Husserl, through Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas to Jacques Derrida. In Chapter 1, a
brief discussion of Heidegger's highly influential contribution to theories of the subject will give
some indication of the impact that phenomenology has had.
A GENEALOGY OF SUBJECTIVITY
The theorisation of subjectivity in the twentieth century has produced a range of different models
and approaches. It is not even agreed with any certainty what the subject itself is. Different theories
follow different paths to different ends. Yet a consistent set of disagreements always marks out an
important zone of debate which can in turn clarify what has been important to us, and indeed the
material of the oldest investigation in humanist and post-humanist culture: how is it that we live?
This book attempts to map out the range and structure of the debate about subjectivity that has done
so much to animate the contemporary humanities and the cultural politics it inspires. To use Michel
Foucault's terminology, therefore, this project is genealogical rather than metaphysical.
A metaphysical investigation aims to determine by the systematic analysis and scrutiny of ideas
what the truth of a certain argument may be. In this context, a metaphysician would analyse and
critique theories of subjectivity in such a way that a preferred
-5-
or ultimate theory could be derived. Psychoanalysts may say one thing and discourse theorists
another, according to the metaphysician, but these various theories are just the stepping-stones to
the inevitable final theory, shimmering tantalisingly on the horizon of our investigations: the goal
that we will one day reach and discover. The genealogical approach, on the other hand, takes the
theories themselves as the object of analysis. The question to be answered is not 'how do we get
beyond these theories to the truth they aspire to but fail to reveal?' but 'what do the debates and
theories themselves tell us about where we are placed in the history of culture and meaningmaking?' The insight that the genealogist seeks is not the truth that will finally make further
discussion redundant, but how the discussion itself-with its wild inconsistencies and its bitter
antagonisms, in which the rivals, like enemy armies in some famous battles, never quite seem to
catch sight of each other-defines the way we live and represent ourselves. In this sense, the purpose
of this book is not to try to explain the subject itself, but to reach a better understanding of how the
issue of subjectivity has become so important to us.
There are a number of reasons why I have adopted this approach. Firstly, I am not confident that the
human subject is susceptible to final explanation. This is not to repeat the romantic idea that the
human soul is so unique and mysterious that any rational or analytical process will never reveal its
final determinants. Both sides of this particular debate-those who want to pin the subject down
definitively, and those who resist them-rest on the same model of subjectivity: for those who
believe that we will one day have an ultimate model of the self, subjectivity must be a consistent
and quantifiable entity, a stable thing whose limits we can know and whose structure we can map.
For those who believe the opposite, subjectivity is also a thing, but an ineffable one, producing
intensities, emotions and values that are so beautiful or unique that they bear witness to an ultimate,
irreplaceable and inexplicable individuality that is dazzling yet self-contained, like a precious jewel.
Yet whether it is considered as scientific object or spiritual artefact, this model remains one of a
unique and fixed subject: the only variation is whether it should be understood in rationalimpersonal or spiritual-personal terms.
I do not believe that the subject is like this. Subjectivity is primarily an experience, and remains
permanently open to inconsistency, contradiction and unself-consciousness. Our experience of
ourselves remains forever prone to surprising disjunctions that only
-6the fierce light of ideology or theoretical dogma convinces us can be homogenised into a single
consistent thing. Perhaps each of the imperfect theories we will discuss in the course of this book
accounts for, or at least provides a way of representing, some aspect or moment of our experience,
giving us little flashes of insight or self-recognition that are sometimes pleasurable, sometimes
reassuring but never the final resting-place for our reflection on ourselves. Indeed, even when we
argue forcefully for a specific theorist or theory, we never go so far as to say that every aspect of
our own subjectivity finds its value there. Many will know the famous anecdote about Freud's
refusal to analyse his own cigar- smoking in terms of Oedipal and castration theory. 'Sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar,' he is reported to have said. Even for the most ambitious and hubristic theorists,
there is something about their own subjectivity that they refuse to pin down. In sum then, I would
have to say that not only do I not believe that an ultimate theory of the subject is possible, I also do
not want one. It is the discussion itself that is of interest. It is worth noting that a genealogical rather
than a metaphysical approach to the subject flies in the face of one of the oldest duties of thought in
the West, the Socratic/Platonic command, renewed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to
'know oneself'. In postmodern theory, as we shall see, this very command has been seen as
destructive. Much contemporary thought aims to protect us from anything as definitive as selfknowledge.
Of course, many theorists we will encounter in this book never aspire to or claim that they are
developing complete models of the subject. There have been many global theories of the self, from
Freud to Foucault, that have tried to explain either what the individual subject is and how it has
come about (in the case of the former) or how we have been made to think of ourselves as
individual subjects (in the case of the latter). This book covers these and other big-name theorists,
whose ideas dominated discussions of subjectivity in the 1960s and 1970s.However, in the 1980s
and 1990s, major theorists gave way to significant issues as the focus of debate. Instead of simply
arguing through the work of Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva or Deleuze and Guattari,
discussions started to focus on topics like gender, sexuality, ethnicity and technology. It is this shift
from big names to big themes that explains the mix in this book of chapters addressed to thinkers
and those addressed to topics. To pretend that discussion has always been derived from the work of
major theorists or that it has
-7always been simply teasing at key social/cultural issues would be to misrepresent the situation and
pretend that there has been greater uniformity and consistency of discussion than has really been the
case.
SUBJECTIVITY AND ANTI-SUBJECTIVITY
I have not, in this book, merely chosen to see this most crucial of discussions for modern culture as
entropic and shapeless. Indeed, my argument is that the theories of the subject that have dominated
debate in the field of literary/cultural theory and studies fall into two broad camps. Of course, the
sort of schematic treatment that follows will not adequately show the internal inconsistencies and
disagreement within each approach, but it will provide a shorthand overview of discussions that you
may be able to use to map out the shape of what has been at issue.
I have linked these two approaches with the names Freud and Foucault for convenience more than
anything else. The importance of Freud in the history of psychoanalysis cannot be doubted. Even
allowing for all its tributary subgroups and schisms, psychoanalysis is a movement, with a generally
consistent history and project. On the other side, Foucault's work is not the foundation of anything
as consistent as a movement, does not really claim authority or allegiance, and operates more as a
centre of influence-or, more accurately, as a point of transmission between earlier ideas like those
of Nietzsche and later investigations.
What characterises these two broad approaches? Firstly, psychoanalysis generally understands the
subject as a thing. This may sound obvious, but when we compare this approach to Foucault's, we
will see how important this fundamental statement is. For Freud, we are not born with our
subjectivity intact. Instead, it is instilled in us as a result of our encounter with the bodiesspecifically the gender-of those in our immediate family environment, usually our parents. This
encounter triggers a crisis that awakens our interior life, allowing us to feel we are separate from
those around us, and gives rise to a complex, dynamic and sometimes obscure psychological
structure-in short, the splitting of the subject into conscious and unconscious. Freud's ideas are dealt
with in detail in Chapter 2.
Later psychoanalysts varied the Freudian model, sometimes quite radically, though the most
influential either nominate Freud
-8as their authority figure (for example, Jacques Lacan's call for a return to Freud: see Chapter 3) or
else build their own arguments on a debunking of Freud (for example, Luce Irigaray in Chapter 5).
Lacan translates Freud's model of subjectivity into the less realistic and more abstract domain of
structuralist linguistics, though he does remain faithful to the model of a subject caused by the
intersection between gender and power. Irigaray, on the other hand, draws attention to the crucial
absences in the work of both of these psychoanalytic fathers, specifically their inability to provide a
sensible model of the subjectivity of women. Julia Kristeva (see Chapter 6) splits the difference
between the Lacanian and feminist approaches to psychoanalysis by using some Freudian ideas to
develop a theory of a subjectivity that is more a process than a structure, though the coordinates on
which it can be mapped remain parents (specifically mothers), bodies, gender and language.
Psychoanalysis cannot only be measured out through a sequence of major thinkers, however. The
issues and terms that it has developed have also had a widespread influence on more general
debates, not only about femininity but also about the politics of sexual 'orientation' (see Chapter 8),
specifically in relation to Freud's term 'polymorphous perversity', in which perversion is seen as the
obscure bedrock of everybody's sexual constitution. Freudian themes can also be traced through
discourses on masculinity and its relation to cinema (Laura Mulvey's theory of the gender of the
cinematic gaze) and, indirectly, through the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick's work on 'homosociality' or the meaning of the relations between men, both of which are
discussed in Chapter 7.
In sum, psychoanalysis is the key school of thought which attempts to explain the truth of the
subject, how our interior life is structured, how it has been formed, and how it can explain both
uniquely individual traits (for example, nervous habits and sexual tastes) and vastly public ones (for
example, the politics of gender and culture). Its authority rests on the assumption, found nearly
everywhere in Western thought in the modern era, that its object of analysis is quantifiable and
knowable-in short, a real thing, with a fixed structure, operating in knowable and predictable
patterns. Because of its commitment to this idea of stable and recognisable models, I understand
psychoanalysis as the key subjective theory of the subject.
This near tautology begs the question: how can there possibly be an anti-subjective theory of the
subject? Yet this is exactly what
-9emerges in the work of Michel Foucault and others indebted to nineteenth-century German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche understood human life, and life in general,
not in terms of the thinking and self-aware human person, lighting his or her way through the world
by moral choices and discerning knowledges. Instead, we are each the embodiment of a quantum of
force called 'will'. Those with little of this life-force-the herd of the weak-try to constrain those with
more-the élite of the strong-by inventing all sorts of moral categories that assert doctrines of guilt
and responsibility. In turn, the major vehicle of constraint is language, which petrifies the illusion
that for every action there is a pre-existing subject responsible for it.
Foucault, although hardly partisan to Nietzsche's counter-democratic arrogance, has taken from him
the idea that subjectivity is not a really existing thing, but has been invented by dominant systems
of social organisation in order to control and manage us. We are educated and harassed till we
believe that the proper organization of the world depends on the division of the human population
into fixed categories-the sick separate from the well, the sane from the insane, the honest from the
criminal-each exposed to different types of management, in the hands of doctors, social workers,
police, teachers, courts and institutions (from schools to prisons, factories to hospitals, asylums to
the military), all regulated according to rationalised principles of truth and knowledge. In this way,
'subjectivity' is not the free and spontaneous expression of our interior truth. It is the way we are led
to think about ourselves, so we will police and present ourselves in the correct way, as not insane,
criminal, undisciplined, unkempt, perverse or unpredictable.
In sum, for Foucault the subject is the primary workroom of power, making us turn in on ourselves,
trapping us in the illusion that we have a fixed and stable selfhood that science can know,
institutions can organise and experts can correct. Nietzsche and Foucault's ideas are outlined in
Chapter 4. These ideas have also been hugely influential, feeding into debates about gender (in the
work of Judith Butler: see Chapter 5) and queer theory (see Chapter 8), and fuelling a fierce critique
of psychoanalysis as the key example of subjective modelling (see Amina Mama and Hortense
Spillers' work on psychology and ethnicity in Chapter 9, and Deleuze and Guattari's critique of
psychoanalysis in Chapter 10).
These two approaches, the psychoanalytic/subjective and the Foucauldian/anti-subjective, will be
the key landmarks of the
-10discussion in this book. Like all work in the humanities, these models are offered up not because
they are believed to be true, nor because they offer a complete account of all thinking on the
subject. They are merely a useful schema that we can bear in our minds as we measure out the
contributions of individual works to the debate about culture and subjectivity. I invite the reader to
find the holes in this division. Psychoanalysis has to be seen as a school of thought with a wide
variety of opinions and intense internal debate. Foucault's legacy could hardly be said to form
anything as coherent as a school. But since we are dealing here not with a random and disconnected
set of thinkers, but with a debate in which different points of view are aware of and contest one
another, we must find some (albeit inadequate) way of mapping the patterns and consistencies we
encounter. I hope and expect that better models than mine will emerge, but for the sake of
intellectual work, which depends more than anything else on the tentative making of informed
connections between things, I hope that it will be of some use to you.
THE SUBJECT IS A CONSTRUCT
What these two schools of thought do have in common is their separation from what we consider to
be the commonsense model of the subject that we have inherited from the Enlightenment: the idea
that we are possessed of a free and autonomous individuality that is unique to us, and that develops
as part of our spontaneous encounter with the world. Martin Heidegger's contribution to the presentday crisis of subjectivity, as it has been called, was to propose that this model of the subject was a
superficial illusion perpetrated on us by Descartes and the philosophers he influenced. It is with this
issue that any treatment of modern and postmodern subjectivity must start, and it is to this we will
turn in Chapter 1.
Yet before we do, something must be said about the consensus amongst theorists that the subject is
constructed, made within the world, not born into it already formed. This is a difficult idea to accept
at first, as it flies in the face of our assumption-probably derived from popular representations of the
Nature described in Darwin and other Evolutionary theory-that the most intense of our feelings
must be innate, natural or instinctive. This assumption is most often apparent in discussions of
gender and sexuality: surely the aggression men feel or the statistical dominance of what has
-11come to be known as 'heterosexuality' is evidence of the inclinations of Nature itself? Yet attempts
to theorise subjectivity have almost always led to the opposite conclusion. In sexuality, for example,
it is not Nature that is seen to appear at the core of our most deeply felt irresistible desires, but
politics. Indeed, on reflection, perhaps it is the commonsense assumption of the power of Nature
that seems most unconvincing. Surely we should not be surprised that it is the social and cultural
pressures, inculcated by the uncodified but heavily reinforced rules of playground, street, family
and mass media, by the intense pressure of social living for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months
and years of our waking and even our sleeping lives, surely it is this ever-present, everreintroduced, ever-mysterious pressure, and the sanctions it can marshal-ostracism, mockery and
violence-and not the absent imaginary impulses of a distant and hypothetical 'Nature' that would
induce in us the most intense feelings of love and fear, of desire and danger? It is finally this belief
that the problem of interior life is best understood in terms of culture and politics, rather than
science and Nature, that provides this book with its material.
-12-
4 Foucault: The subject and power
THE THEORIES OF subjectivity that have dominated the second half of the twentieth century fall
broadly into two categories: those that attempt to define the nature or structure of the subject (its
'truth'), and those that see any definition of subjectivity as the product of culture and power. The
former is associated with Freud and psychoanalysis, and the work of Jacques Lacan; the latter with
the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Michel Foucault (1926-84). Both these models
may seem surprising to those coming from outside of the discussion. Where is the image of the
subject as autonomous and free, as authentic and naturally occurring-the subject of Rousseau and of
Romantic poetry; the thinking, feeling, agent making its way through the world, giving expression
to its emotions and fulfilment to its talents and energies? In short, despite the fierce antagonism
between the different theories in the debate around subjectivity, they agree in seeing this older form
of the subject-the 'individual'-as a mirage or even a ruse, either of language's symbolic order or of
power.
Chapter 3 introduced Lacan's theories of the subject and its relation to language. This chapter
outlines what Nietzsche, and especially Foucault, had to say about power, showing how their view
diverges from that of Rousseau.
THE SUBJECT AS A CONSTRUCT
As I have mentioned, both the Lacanian and Foucauldian points of view dispute the model of the
subject as a free and autonomous individual. They also see the subject as a construct. For both, the51subject does not come into the world with all its nature and scope encapsulated within itself in
embryonic form. Subjectivity is made by the relationships that form the human context. To
psychoanalysis, dominant amongst these are family relationships defined in terms of gender and
sexuality. For Foucault, they are the broad relationships of power and subordination that are present
everywhere in all societies.
Both approaches also pinpoint the key mechanism by which this context forms the individual:
language. Their understandings diverge in terms of what it is about language that most
systematically affects the subject. As we saw in the last chapter, for Lacan it is what Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure called the 'signifier', the very functioning material of language. For Foucault,
it is the discourses of truth and knowledge from which are derived our models of normal and
abnormal behaviour.
Yet this is as far as the similarity between the two groups goes. To psychoanalysis, the Foucauldian
tradition omits a fully fledged definition of the nature of the subject. To Foucault, it is this very
need to derive a final and complete understanding of the nature of the subject that makes
psychoanalysis what he calls a 'totalitarian' theory, collaborating with power rather than revealing
some way of frustrating it-his understanding of the ultimate purpose of theoretical work.
ALTHUSSER AND THE INTERPELLATED SUBJECT
It is important to recall that Foucault's theory of the relationship between the subject and power was
not the first political theory of subjectivity to be influential. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser
(1918-90) was developing a definition of the subject's place under capitalism in the late 1960s, at
about the same time as the post-structuralist theorists who would soon attract far more attention. His
most important treatment of the issue comes in the long essay, 'Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses' (Althusser 1971, pp.121-73), written in 1969. The purpose of this essay is to
investigate how the structure of capitalist society reproduces itself. How do successive generations
become the docile workers and consumers the capitalist system needs? This cannot simply be
explained by the repressive forces that the capitalist state has at its disposal-what Althusser calls the
Repressive State Apparatuses, like the army, police and prison system.
-52The answer is to be found in the institutions that reproduce the values, meanings and logic of the
capitalist system-what are called Ideological State Apparatuses, like the church, family and
especially the school (more recent commentators would, of course, add the mass media). These
institutions endlessly reinforce capitalist values-or, at least, the right degree of docility and fatalism
in us, making us useful to the dominant order. Thus, capitalism does not simply operate on the level
of industries, classes and structures. It succeeds by creating subjects who become its instruments
and bearers. Ideology needs subjectivity. It constitutes us as subjects by 'interpellating' us,
according to Althusser-calling out to us in the way a policeman calls out to someone in the street, to
use his most famous example. He writes: 'the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere onehundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.' (Althusser 1971, p. 163) By
calling out to him, the policeman creates from the solitary walker in the street a certain type of
subject-one answerable to the law and to the state and system behind it. This subject does not
develop according to its own wants, talents and desires, but exists for the system that needs it. Its
only public reality is determined for it by the social apparatus that calls it into a certain kind of
being. Subjectivity, therefore, is the type of being we become as we fit into the needs of the larger
political imperatives of the capitalist state. It requires us not only to behave in certain ways, but to
be certain types of people.
Althusser's influence has steadily declined since the late 1970s, reflecting the decline of Marxism's
academic prestige and the rise of other types of politics, specifically those of gender, sexuality and
ethnicity. It is important to note some crucial distinctions between his ideas and Foucault's,
however. Althusser's theory contrasts ideology (the false consciousness capitalism instils in us so
that we cooperate with it) and science (the insights into the true nature of the social order that
Marxism can produce). The latter is a model of a truth that can contribute to the correct
revolutionary species of power-a new social order, in fact. To Foucault, there can be no such
impersonal 'scientific' truth. Ever mutating and ever dangerous, power and the so-called truth it uses
to justify and extend itself are always in all of their forms to be met with scepticism and resistance.53FOUCAULT ON THE FREE AND AUTONOMOUS SUBJECT
Let us turn to a summary of Foucault's work, by way of quick reference to Rousseau. As we saw in
Chapter 1, Rousseau saw the individual as self-sufficient. Walking in the woods of Saint-Germain,
he contemplated the true nature of the human self, descended from its original form to a state of
prejudice and confusion by the working of human culture and society. Not only was this natural self
the subject of Rousseau's contemplation, but he was also giving it dramatic form. His solitary
walking was itself a reanimation, a rediscovery, of the same individual self-sufficiency.
This image of the self as compromised by the world, yet recoverable beneath the detritus and
inauthenticity of day-to-day life, still has a powerful attraction. From the counter-cultural call to act
purely according to spontaneous desire, to the pop psychological truism that you should 'be
yourself, the modern era has been saturated by the dream that social life is a place of compromise
and debasement, but that-somewhere-your true self remains hidden, free and available, if only you
can find the right social group, language or personal style. According to this model, the individual is
self-contained and complete, and society presses in on it from the outside, frustrating its dreams and
restricting its ability to express itself.
This is the very model of individuality that Foucault disputes. He writes in a very clear statement of
his position:
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a
multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens
to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the
prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain
desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is
not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an
effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect,
it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the
same time its vehicle. (Foucault 1980b, p. 98)
This extract stands at loggerheads with Rousseau's model of the self, which it clearly identifies in its
first sentence: the individuality we dream of, that primitive, elementary and self-contained form that
society and politics stand outside of and oppress. According
-54to Rousseau's model, this oppression arises after the subject has been made complete by Nature.
The individual comes first, almost producing itself. Power comes after, confusing and limiting the
individual. It is this intervention by power that we so often dream of resisting: from within the
limitations imposed on us by power, we seek-like Rousseau-to recover the true self that predates it.
Foucault sees this narrative the other way round. Power comes first, he argues, and the 'individual'and all the things we identify as making up our individuality (our separate body, its idiosyncratic
gestures, its specific way of using language, its secret desires)-are really effects of power, designed
for us rather than by us. As a result, we are not the antagonists of power, standing opposite (or 'visà-vis' it). We are the very material of power, the thing through which it finds its expression. What
makes us such an effective 'vehicle' for power is the very fact that we seek to see ourselves as free
of it and naturally occurring. For Foucault, Rousseau's free and autonomous individual is not
merely an alternative, outmoded theory of subjectivity, a quaint forerunner to contemporary
discussions. This very model is the one that allows power to conceal itself, and to operate so
effectively.
The dream of individuality denies power, and encourages the individual to become preoccupied
with itself-in short, to monitor its own behaviour. Kant saw 'self-consciousness' as the basis of all
human experience of the world. Slightly later, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), the highly influential
German philosopher who had such an impact on nineteenth-century thought, including the work of
Karl Marx, described in his mammoth work The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) how self-
consciousness was the destiny of human history, its highest form and purpose. To Foucault, all
these images of human self-consciousness ended up as the modern individual endlessly turned in on
itself, supposedly discovering its unique truth, but really making itself prey to a power that asks it to
be forever aware of and assessing its desires and inclinations. The aim of this chapter is to fully
explain what Foucault means here, and to illustrate the most significant ways in which this power
operates us.
NIETZSCHE ON SUBJECTIVITY
Before we go into Foucault's work in detail, however, it is worth briefly investigating the ideas of
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the key forerunners of Foucault's work. Nietzsche remains a
-55controversial figure in Western popular history at least, because he was claimed as an influence by
the Nazis. How accurately they represented his work is still a subject of debate. In terms of the
history of ideas, however, Nietzsche's work stands as a stark rejection of the Enlightenment's faith
in reason and universal principles of human value and rights.
In contrast to a society built on impartial and equal commitment to freedom and justice, Nietzsche
lauded force, and its essence, will. The human species was divided into those who mindlessly aped
convention, and those who, because of some lionine interior power, reached towards a superhuman
capacity that was the harbinger of a coming stage of development where the human species as we
know it will be surpassed by a higher form. This image of herd behaviour being superseded by a
history- smashing élite seems obnoxious to the democratic rhetoric around which we build our
judgements in public life. Yet it has had a huge impact on twentieth-century culture. The cultural
and social avant garde (from Dadaism at the time of the First World War, through various countercultures to the present) have long abominated bourgeois conformity as a life of mindless and mean
vindictiveness. Still, in contemporary advertising and pop psychology, the imperative to transcend
all opposition by believing in yourself and relying on personal willpower tries to catch the echo of
the élitism Nietzsche hoped would usher in a new era. Certainly, it is no more respectful of
egalitarianism.
Foucault's work does not share Nietzsche's disdain for the majority of people, but it does present a
portrait of a heroic self-creating force, challenging the restrictions of conventional life. In
Nietzsche, also, we find the origins of Foucault's understanding of subjectivity and its relationship
to language. Let us look at Nietzsche's opinions here, and show how they relate to the crucial
Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche writes:
A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect-more, it is nothing
other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the
seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it) which
conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects,
by a 'subject', can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the
lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject
called lightning, so popular
-56morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral
substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so.
But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming;
'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything. (1989, p.45)
Here, Nietzsche challenges the commonsense notion of cause and effect as it appears in 'popular'
judgements of human behaviour. Traditionally, we see an event as an expression of the inner reality
of the thing that causes that event. Things exist in the world; they have an essential nature. When
they act on the world, the effects that they give rise to are a result of that inner nature. In moral
terms, a criminal deed is performed by someone who has a criminal nature, whether it has been
born in them or is the result of their experiences. This makes them answerable for the disastrous
consequences of their action.
This morality had been given extra force by the Enlightenment's focus on the individual. But this
logic is an illusion, according to Nietzsche. It is quite wrong to assume that behind every effect
there is a human 'subject' intending it, and therefore answerable. Lightning, in his analogy, is not
something that exists permanently, occasionally flashing in the sky to signal its presence. Lightning
is only this flashing, and it is a mistake to separate the two. The phrase, 'lightning flashes' is a
tautology. Lightning can do nothing other than flash, and exists only in its flashing. It is language
that gives the illusion that something called lightning exists separate from the fact of its flash.
Grammar gives the impression that lightning is a thing, and flashing merely something that it may
or may not sometimes do.
Similarly, it is 'a seduction of language' to think that subjects exist who can choose or not choose to
act in certain ways. Force, will, energy and power circulate in-indeed define-the universe, unable
not to produce dramatic and violent conflicts and impacts. Grammar, with its imaginary subjects, is
an attempt to constrain those powerful figures who are in tune with this will, and give it its fullest
expression-who are indeed, for Nietzsche, the hope of a higher life. The 'weak', unable to partake of
this higher will, have invented morality, and embedded it in the categories of language to give the
impression that the powerful could choose not to be strong. But this is quite false. Strength can only
be strength, and the morality that tries to constrain it is an obstacle
-57to the ascent of the élite, out of the morass of history that is the legacy of the pettiness and
vindictiveness of the meek. In short, morality, and its instrument language, are not universal
systems of absolute truths and values, but weapons in a power game where one group in the human
world tries to constrain another.
THE SUBJECT AND DISCIPLINARY POWER
The primary idea that Foucault has derived from Nietzsche's argument is that 'subjects' only come
into existence through the complex interplay between power and language. According to Foucault,
pre-modern modes of power, which relied on a religious obedience and vicious force, by the late
eighteenth century could no longer cope with the mobile and fractured nature of the human
population. A new type of power arose, one invested in systems of social administration rather than
lodged in individuals and titles-in other words, a power built around institutions (prisons,
workhouses, schools, factories, hospitals, barracks) rather than around kings and aristocrats. In
order that human populations could be better organised, new mechanisms of power needed to be
developed.
We remember how, in Nietzsche's argument, morality contrived the category of the subject, and
lodged it in language to foster the assumption that individuals existed who were responsible for
their actions. The new impersonal power growing with the modern age did something similar,
according to Foucault. It developed new truths about human beings which distinguished normal
from abnormal behaviour. New academic disciplines appeared, like psychology, sociology and
criminology. These disciplines started to produce new arguments and counter-arguments that
supposedly provided a scientific insight into the truth of human behaviour. The range of
discussions, studies, surveys, theories and reports (collectively called 'discourses') produced by
these disciplines were not always consistent. They were often the site of bitter dispute. But they
were able to coordinate with the institutions that were springing up at the same time to justify
various types of therapy, from re-education to isolation and drugs. These discourses are large and
amorphous fields of writing, claiming to deliver the 'truth' about individuals: what makes us sane or
insane, criminal or law-abiding, sick or well.
The linchpin of these new knowledges is, as in Nietzsche, the 'subject'. Where the prejudice that
every action was the effect of
-58its cause, the subject, was petrified in the grammatical subject of the sentence, modern discourses
invented the subject as the imagined origin of all behaviour and thus the ultimate object of analysis.
The justification for this was the much-lauded 'self-consciousness' that had been one of the dreams
of the Enlightenment: theories of what made the individual what it is would provide an insight into
the truth of human nature. But in the same way that, for Nietzsche, morality was a counter-strike
against the strong, for Foucault, discourses of knowledge are merely instruments in power's dream
of totally organising human populations.
POWER/KNOWLEDGE
The subject does not exist as a naturally occurring thing, but is contrived by the double work of
power and knowledge to maximise the operation of both. Indeed, so coordinated are power and
knowledge that Foucault collapsed them into a single term: power/knowledge. It is impossible,
according to this argument, for one to exist without the other: systems of power require some truth
to be derived to justify what they seek to do. Disciplines of knowledge always divide the human
population into distinct categories that are one of the prime instruments of power.
One of Foucault's clearest examples of how power/knowledge operates is in the development of the
prison. Prisons do not function here as an institution on the margins of social life, but as one that is
absolutely central to the day-to-day management of our subjectivity. This is because of the impact
the existence of prisons has on us as individuals, but also because the development of the prison is
typical of the changes that have been taking place in the politics of the subject since the
Enlightenment. In the early modern era, according to Foucault, crime was controlled by spectacular
and public displays of absolute power, performed importantly on the transgressor's body - the public
dismemberment, torture and execution of the transgressor brought the normally invisible power of
the sovereign into the marketplace for all to see. This power was dramatic and stunning, but more or
less absent from the routines of the ordinary day. The gradual development of the prison and the
systematisation of court proceedings rationalised crime and punishment, making it an inextricable
part of the public logic of society.
The physical presence of the prison, and similar institutions (the asylum, the workhouse, even the
school and factory), did transform
-59the urban landscape. Yet this was not the mechanism that allowed the meaning of the prison to
become such an important factor in modern life. The prison operates, according to Foucault, on the
level of the subject. This happens in two ways: firstly, by way of the forms of truth that develop
around the reality of crime and the criminal; and secondly, by way of the methodology used within
the modern prison. Let us study these one at a time.
Firstly, the prison does not simply incarcerate people arbitrarily. It depends on a system of proper
proceedings that in turn must be justified by codes of law or legal precedent. According to the
Enlightenment model of subjectivity, the 'individual' is the focus of proceedings, prone before the
weight of the institutions of law, but also-in theory, at least-protected by rights. At a deeper level,
however, this isolation allows the individual to become an object of study and analysis. What was
once a person becomes a phenomenon. The person who has committed a crime becomes something
else altogether: the criminal. As a type, the individual becomes subject to analysis, according to
ostensibly scientific models. What personality traits make you a criminal? What social conditions
lead to crime? What cultural factors (age, class, gender, even ethnicity) predispose individuals to
antisocial behaviour?
Here, the 'individual' is not free and autonomous, but the focal point of larger forces, analysed by
systems of knowledge in what they claim is an impartial quest for truth. Your interior life is not
your own property, with its own logic and inner truth, that you bring into society as a free agent. It
is a permanently open display case of psychological and sociological truths, to which you always
remain subordinate. Whether we commit crime or not, we are never out of reach of the
psychological and sociological theories that circulate about crime. The criminal is a type of person,
a mode of subjectivity, and we seek evidence of it within ourselves. We feel that we may always be
under the scrutiny of others-of strangers, of hidden surveillance or of tabloid TV cameras. This
results in us exaggerating to this hypothetical audience the legality and normality of our behaviour.
PANOPTICISM
This sort of casual yet compulsory paranoia attunes normal day- to-day life to the routine of the
prison, our second point. Here, Foucault has famously chosen the liberal economist and social
-60reformer Jeremy Bentham's ( 1748-1832) design of a model prison-the panopticon-as a summary
and image of how the putatively criminal subject is managed. In Bentham's prison design, tiers of
cells open on to a central courtyard, in the middle of which is a guard tower. With the cells open at
the front, a single guard placed in the tower is able to look into dozens of cells more or less
simultaneously. Prisoners will never know if they are being observed or not. Furthermore, if some
sort of opaque window- covering is fitted to the tower, it may never need to be occupied at all.
Since they may be under observation all the time or never, the prisoner becomes responsible for
appearing to behave acceptably. Behaviour, according to the logic of the new sciences of
psychology, has only one meaning: it is a sign of the nature of the subject within. The prisoner
behaves correctly if they have been reformed, or are penitent. The new names for prisons in the
nineteenth century (reformatories and penitentiaries) clearly exhibit this new focus not on punishing
the body as spectacular early modern punishments had done, but on correcting the soul. These
institutions are not interested in merely making sure 'criminals' will not repeat certain acts, but in
curing them, changing the nature of their subjectivity. The isolation and monitoring of the body,
placing it in a context of maximum visibility, serves merely to allow the subject to be analysed,
according to the reigning knowledge about what is and is not illegal or antisocial behaviour. In an
important formulation, Foucault reverses the Christian platitude to say 'the soul is the prison of the
body' (Foucault 1979, p. 30).
Thus the subjectivity of both the citizen in the street and the prisoner are constantly being analysed
and measured. The functions of this analysis are threefold: to individualise, normalise and
hierarchise. Firstly, the subject is to be seen and to feel separate from others. Our primary reality
ceases to be derived from a locality, religion, or even an ethnicity. In the modern era, subjects are
isolated before the psychological truth they exhibit. Secondly, this allows us all to be measured
according to standards of behaviour. There is a healthy, a legal, an acceptable form of behaviour,
and the behaviour of individual subjects can be plotted against it. This takes place not just at the
level of crime, but in the most trivial behaviour: running in a crowded street, laughing too loud,
shouting in public are all seen as potentially dangerous, and are notionally connected with violence
and crime, especially in social groups that are already considered suspect, like teenagers. Thus, with
the application of norms, certain behaviours-and thus certain subjects-can be
-61compared with one another. Hierarchies of the more or less criminal, the more or less acceptable
can be designed.
According to Foucault, the panopticon is typical of the processes of subjectification that govern
modern life. Power organises the population into individual units that are then subject to monitoring
in a system of maximum visibility. This works most effectively in institutions. Hospitals, schools
and universities, banks, departments of social security and tax all keep files on us. We simply forget
about these files, or accept them as a necessary and inevitable part of the operation of these
institutions. Yet they are our effective social reality, and contain 'truths' about us that can be
manipulated outside of our control. Like the files themselves, the truth they contain about us is not
our property.
Each of these institutions operates according to its own theories and knowledges: the remedial
reader, the uncooperative adolescent, the hysterical patient, the credit risk-these are all types of
subjectivity that we may or may not occupy, sometimes even without knowing it. You can see here
the coincidence of power and knowledge, as Foucault has theorised it. Each of these institutions has
classes of persons into which everyone who deals with them is distributed. The apparently simple
and necessary logic of this categorisation-it is not a conspiracy to oppress us, our common sense
says, how could these institutions operate otherwise?-already separates us from one another,
isolating us, opening up and closing off opportunities, destining us for certain rewards and
punishments. The system of truth on which each institution depends is always already a power at
work on us.
This is what our individuality has become. We can see here the logic of the quote from Foucault
with which we began: individuality is not something free and naturally occurring, as Rousseau had
imagined it, that is then affected by society. Social institutions need to define us as individuals,
separate from one another, all in our own individual files, all in fear of the tax audit we must face
alone, or glancing nervously at the security camera that may or may not be filming us at the ATM.
Individuality, therefore, is not the highest possibility of human life, if only we could attune society
to allow it expression. Instead, the individual is the thing social institutions need us to feel we are,
so that we remain vulnerable to the truths they have contrived for their own efficiency. The power
at work here is not the power of the absolute monarch, who appears dramatically in the marketplace
to display his might. Instead, it is an anonymous and impersonal power that
-62saturates the pettiest and quietest moments of our personal lives, pressing us with what we should
be-at the height of its operation, even becoming us.
THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE
What can we do about it, then? The answer to this question leads us to one of the most important
themes of Foucault's later work, the 'aesthetics of existence'. If power/knowledge works at the level
of the subject, then it is at the level of the subject that it will most effectively be resisted. Since there
is no authentic or natural self that we can simply recover or struggle to liberate, subjects should be
geared towards a dynamic self-creation, an experimental expansion of the possibilities of
subjectivity in open defiance of the modes of being that are being laid down for us constantly in
every moment of our day-to-day lives.
Interestingly, Foucault rediscovered some sympathy for the Enlightenment project of critical selfconsciousness, particularly as he found it in Kant. His famous essay, 'What is Enlightenment?',
(1984) suggests that if subjects are really to deal with their situation in the modern world, they need
to make themselves aware of the sorts of selfhood that are being constructed for them, all with the
aim of contriving some alternative, albeit fanciful or ephemeral. His own work, with its analysis of
the subjectivities demanded of us by institutions and, towards the end of his life, of the abstract
concept sexuality (see Chapter 8), aimed to trace the haphazard historical development (or
'genealogy') of these subjectivities. Armed with this self-awareness, we can construct a fictional or
hypothetical selfhood outside of, or in pure hostility to, the conventions modern life seeks to
normalise.
In this way, Foucault found in his project of an experimental selfhood the way of forging a
connection between aesthetics, ethics and politics. His study of the sexuality of Ancient Greece and
Rome revealed a subjectivity that was managed according to an 'ethics of pleasure' (Foucault 1990,
p.239). The self constantly problematised its place in the world and its relationship to others and to
inherited codes of behaviour. As a result, the subject would not simply rely on some unknowable
notion of a pure natural selfhood, but would produce itself endlessly as a response to its cultural and
historical context. This ethical preoccupation with the responsible management of the self touches
on politics on the one hand (with its-63attempt to frustrate power/knowledge), and aesthetics on the other, with its willingness to embrace
the fictional and fantastic. In the classical context, this self-management sounds dour, but Foucault's
idea of self-creation has inspired performance artists, radical fashion designers and major cultural
festivals like the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, with its charged engagement with the
imagery of popular culture and its dramatic revealing of the hidden breadths of Western sexual
practice. Foucault himself experimented with sado-masochism as a way of imagining new forms of
selfhood that transgressed the rules of what modern discourse and its ironic police force, tabloid
news culture, has laid down as acceptable sexual practice.
It would be a mistake to describe the influence these ideas have had on recent theories of the subject
as forming a school or movement. Foucault's work is, however, a key reference point for those who
want to engage with the way subjectivity has become a mode of social organisation and
administration. In this way, it is a great resource for those who reject both the Enlightenment model
of the free and autonomous individual, combatting a society that seeks to oppress it, and that it in
turn seeks to attune to its own freedom and self-expression, and the psychoanalytic model of a
subject formed around desire and lack by a family politics of gender and language. To those who
work with Foucault's ideas, subjectivity is always everywhere a fiction, and has no intrinsic reality
or structure, neither one given to us at our birth or as a result of the relationships and experiences of
our early lives. This fiction may be exploded, or remodelled as a subversion of the demands power
places on us.
Yet, however we choose to respond, Foucault's ideas encourage a rigorously sceptical attitude
towards subjectivity, one that I have called in the introduction 'anti-subjective' because it will
always see any statement that claims to speak the truth about our subjectivity as an imposition, a
technique of power and social administration. In sum, the intensity of this scepticism is designed to
match what is seen as the almost immeasurable cynicism of a power that controls us most
effectively by making us believe in a uniquely contemporary and absolutely desperate way in our
own freedom.-64-